STORY ARCHIVE

Dr. Andrew Harris - 2007 Eureka People’s Choice nominee

Chemical Engineer Dr Andrew Harris has been nominated for a Eureka People’s Choice Prize for his work on carbon nanotubes – a lightweight material ten times stronger than steel which can not only be used to make bullet proof cloth, but could one day cut carbon emissions from cars by up to 90 per cent.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr Andrew Harris: I did chemistry at school and then I did chemistry at university and I am actually a terrible chemist. And then I discovered this thing called chemical engineering, which is chemistry on a big scale.

I spend a lot of time on my bike thinking. It’s a lovely ride from the beach to the university .

I work with a fantastic bunch of people. No academic ever works alone.

We’re trying to change the way that people live and change the impact they have on the planet. The work that my group is doing is to try and find a way to make lots and lots of carbon nanotubes.

Narration: Carbon nanotubes are made from an element found all around us – as charcoal, graphite in pencils and in its crystalline form, diamonds. Gram for gram, carbon nanotubes are worth almost as much.

Associate Professor Geoff Barton: Carbon nanotubes have been around for quite some time. The challenge for people like Andrew is to take those things through to the level where they can be made commercially viable and I think that’s what he is doing and that is why his science is so good.

Dr Andrew Harris: Carbon nanotubes are just the most fantastic thing I’ve ever come across in science. If you imagine a sheet of chicken wire and you roll it up in the shape of a test tube and then you shrink it down so that it’s 10,000 times smaller than the hair on your head and you make it out of carbon, that’s a carbon nanotube. Very good quality ones can be as much as two thousand US dollars a gram.

Carbon nanotubes are the strongest material that mankind has ever come across - ten times stronger than steel.The US army have come up with a bullet proof cloth that has nanotubes woven into it that will stop a bullet from not very far away.

There’s a really, really interesting example form NASA. They want to replace the space shuttle program. They’ll have a satellite in space tethered to the Earth and the rope will be made of carbon nanotubes because that is the only material we have that’s strong enough and flexible enough

Now if you make your new cars out of carbon nanotube reinforced plastic which you can do, instead of a car weighing two tonnes it will only weigh a couple of hundred kilograms so you reduce the amount of emissions by 90 per cent.

So those are the sort of technologies we are trying to bring about. That’s why I get up out of bed in the morning.

I love thinking about what the future could hold and what you need to do to get there.